MyBrainHurts

Mongo and Princess Donut!!!

It’s our problem plagued philosophy!

An ethical shoe company pivots to… AI? Those are some weird synergies.

It’s amazing what happens when a group has an incredibly high voter turnout…

It’s free and using it means I don’t have to support American tech companies.

Ok so I know indians who have lives as nice as mine or better and are in my field

This is exactly the point. The fact that many (though frankly, a small percentage of Indians as a whole) who have quite nice lives is a goddamn miracle. I’ll put it this way, those basics of life you were talking about; a home, plumbing, electricity, were not widespread in India until recently. As late as the mid 90s, about 70% of Indians didn’t have access to a household toilet. That number is now 10%, which, while an order of magnitude higher than the West, is an incredible gain.

It’s just mind bogglingly ignorant to claim that the rest of the world isn’t improving.

silent generation and greates generation in a city had running water and electricity for most of their lives. Yeah you could point to very rural greatest or it not being available when they were very young

And this is just silly. About half the population at the time was rural. Like, quality of life only matters if you live in a city? What the hell?

Edit: Link to the toilets in India, because they have data over time. It’s amazing and kind of beautiful to read about that sort of improvement in the lives of more than a billion people. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10373110/

Im talking silent generation and greatest generation

Not if you’re talking about ubiquitous running water… (in the 1930s to 50s, only 70% of urban homes had indoor plumbing, while a scant 20% of rural ones, where about half the population lived, did.)

The gap between richest and poorest in the first world is that much worse just for the obscene levels of wealth some have.

Again, this has nothing to do with the world.

An india and china were helped by aid in the past but you would need to look before 2000 for that.

Okay and the revocation of aid now is not going to stop their development. No idea what you’re trying to say.

a few places that were worse off have gotten kinda sorta almost lives like yours.

No, literally for most of the world, life has gotten better. That’s the entire point.

when living in india near an ocean sounds great to a first worlder

If they are impressively ignorant, sure. If you are a middle class person, hell, even poor, in the first world, would you swap places with a random Indian or Chinese person? If you have any understanding of those countries, the answer would be a hard no.

It ignores that we had a generation or three at one time where an entire large family could be supported with one income working 40 hours a week and owning their own home that had electricity and running water with no great success.

Yes, the boomers were among the wealthiest generation that has ever lived. (Though, let’s not forget that at the times you’re talking about, this really only applied to straight white men, for women, minorities etc, well, they have a very different perspective on those golden years you’re talking about.) Globally though, first world boomers were among the very richest in the entire world. As the charts in the article show, the richest in the world, then as now, things are (relative to the global poor) going down for them.

Things can both be getting worse for us, as we are among the wealthiest on the planet (are you making the clothes or wearing them? How many of your friends have a phone vs how many of them have lost limbs mining the cobalt that they need?) while getting better for the vast majority of people.

Trump stopped so many programs and many countries are following suite and can’t make up for the loss even if they could.

USAID etc are not the engines of economic development among the world’s poorest. They generally exist to mitigate horrific problems (think war based starvation, HIV etc) which tangentially affect poverty but really, the big stars are places like India and China which have risen literally billions out of poverty with focused development etc.

Yes, our pampered lives are probably not going to be as easy as our parents. But compared to almost everyone else on the planet, my God we have a sweet deal.

On the plus side, I think you at least you read the article…

and of course looks globally so that its not showing whats happening to the poor and middle class in the developed world

Yes, it’s an article about the world, it’s probably going to look globally. It’d be very weird if it didn’t.

Can’t decide if its looking at the richest 10% or 1%

It’s using multiple data points to make their point. In this case, that which is true for the top 10% are also generally true for the 1%, or in other words, this isn’t a phenomenon driven by only one or the other of those groups.

On top of it comparing 2015 to 2025

It compares 2000 to 2025 as well.

and then uses spending

Yes. People who were too poor to afford things can now afford things. But, the same progress is true over a huge variety of metrics. Years ago, women (yes, poor societies tend to be patriarchal) would spend ungodly amounts of their lives lugging water kilometers for their families to use. Housing has gotten better. Malnutrition and deaths of hunger have significantly decreased. Poor parents send more of their kids to school and are burying fewer of them. Huge swathes of the world now have electricity! I cannot recommend Factfulness enough, it’s astounding how incorrect so many of our assumptions are.

whats happening to the poor and middle class in the developed world

I think this is your real point. And sure, for the poor and middle class, who are among the wealthiest people who have ever lived and who generally live a life that would be unimaginable to all but the richest handful over history (hell, a warm shower, now taken for granted, would have been a wild luxury not too long ago) yeah, their standards haven’t risen that much. But consider, even the poorest in the developed world are still wearing clothes made by children who burn to death, and depressingly, those kids are generally (roughly) in the middle income bracket of global incomes.

The developed world has been so far ahead of second and third world countries that yeah, while things might be stagnating for us, for the world as a whole, things are still drastically improving.

Though, if you read to the end, you’ll notice they do talk about rising inequality within countries, which is what you’re talking about.

That tracks. Hans Rosling’s book Factfulness made much the same case about how much life has improved for the world’s poorest.

In our supremely pampered ignorance, most of us have no real idea of how bad world poverty was just within living memory.

Things aren’t great and they could be much better but holy damn, things are much better today than they were.

Someone’s ready for the apocalypse in style!